Saturday, November 30, 2013

Tyrone
Power didn’t really do Westerns. Any big studio star in the 1950s had to climb
into the saddle occasionally but he was much more comfortable romancing exotic dames
or buckling swashes. He was, of course, Jesse James in Fox’s big picture of
that title in 1939 and a pretty dashing Jesse he was too. He also starred in a smaller
but really rather good Fox Western in 1951, Rawhide,
about a remote stage station being besieged by bandits. But he only did six cowboy
films in total and apart from Jesse Jamesand Rawhide, two were Canadian Mountie
pictures, one was a Brigham Young biopic and in the other he was Zorro; they
hardly count as Westerns at all.

After a tiny
(uncredited) part as a Mountie in a small-studio B-picture, Northern Frontier, in 1935, his very first Western appearance, Power returned
to the northern wastes in a red tunic for his last oater, Pony Soldier. Immediately, you recognize
the (rather attractive) scenery of this ‘Canadian’ film as being Sedona, AZ. It’s
all orange rocks and very unSaskatchewany. At least Universal’s rather
unconvincing 1954 Raoul Walsh-directed Mountie picture Saskatchewan starring Alan Ladd had been shot on location in
Alberta (and very nice the photography was too). Fox’s Saskatchewan was
situated a tad further south. Never mind, it looks nice (the scenes not shot in
the studio anyway).

Canada, AZ

It’s supposedly
based on a true story (but we all know how that goes in Hollywood) about a
young, inexperienced Mountie named Constable Duncan MacDonald. It’s 1876. The
RCMP has only being going for three years and no one has yet told Duncan that
the Mountie always gets his man. As a result, he returns to base having let the
fugitive he was pursuing escape. After this faux pas he is assigned to bringing
the whole Cree tribe, which has fled its "reserve" over into the US, back
into Her Majesty’s domains, as well as rescuing two captives that the Cree have
taken. To achieve this mission he only has one helper, the comic-relief fat half-breed
sidekick Natayo Smith, played, with gusto, by Thomas Gomez. New Yorker Gomez is
one of the highlights of the movie, in fact. He was entertaining as the ship's captain
in the New Orleans Dale Robertson flick The Gambler from Natchez. Here he brings life to what otherwise risks being a
rather plodding ‘Western’.

Tyrone with heavweight sidekick Gomez

Well,
Duncan is brave and resourceful, you won’t be surprised to hear. And one of the
captives (Penny Edwards, already in her tenth Western) is glamorous, which won’t
surprise you either. The other is Flint McCullogh! What’s he doing here? A bit
out of his way, isn’t he? Although the Wagon
Train might have passed through Sedona, I guess. Anyway, Robert Horton is a
bad guy, sneering and criminal. He has escaped from one of Her Maj’s jugs north
of the border. Don’t worry, Duncan will see he gets back behind bars.

As part
of the peace treaty, Duncan is semi-obliged to adopt a ten-year-old orphan boy
of the tribe so Fox could have a kid in it. He’s played by Anthony Earl
Numkena but I fear you will search Burke’s
Peerage in vain for this Earl Numkena.

Duncan with adopted son

Always
in these Indian pictures there’s a statesmanlike chief and a younger hothead
brave who is all out for war. Pony Soldier is no exception and we have Stuart
Randall (whose part had to be redubbed as his accent was too Texan) as the
noble Standing Bear, while Cameron Mitchell (Buck Cannon from High Chaparral; I
think of him more though in The Outcasts of Poker Flat, Garden of Evil and as the sheriff gone bad in Hombre)
is very well made up and quite convincing as the warrior Konah (second billed,
no less).

Stuart Randall as Candian chief with Texan accent

They say
Richard Boone was in it but I didn’t spot him. Sadly. IMDb also says it was
Earl Holliman’s film debut. What part did he play? I don’t know.Is it a Western? When is a Western not a Western? Click here to find out.

Anyway,
Pony Soldier is watchable, in a generic sort of way, but don’t expect too much.

There's a bit where a mirage appears and Ty claims it is big medicine of Queen Vic, so they better toe the line

Friday, November 29, 2013

Short story by Dorothy M Johnson (in the 1953
collection Indian Country) & NGP
film starring Richard Harris (1970)

The
commendable upsurge in interest in the real life and culture of American Indians
in writing and movies from the 1950s on was largely the work of Anglo people,
and the Indian life was, understandably perhaps, seen through a white lens. The
stories were (still are, actually) usually recounted by having a white man join
a tribe of what he at first thinks of as savages, then he comes to respect
their culture. James Stewart as Tom Jeffords did this with the Apaches in Broken Arrow, Jack Crabb did it with the
Cheyenne in Little Big Man, and in
more recent times there was Lt. Dunbar (Kevin Costner) in Dances with Wolveswith the Sioux and Eli McCullogh in The Son by Philipp Meyer with the
Comanche. One of the pioneers, however, was Dorothy M Johnson, who did it with
the Crow people. She wrote two quite well received novels in the 1970s but is
better known for her short story collections Indian Country (1953) and The
Hanging Tree (1957). A Man Called Horse comes from Indian Country.

Dorothy M Johnson (1905 - 1984)

A Man Called Horse is a brief, 15-page story which tells of an
unnamed young man, member of a rich Boston family, who while out in the West in
1845 is captured by a party of Crow, who kill and scalp the guides and servants
he has engaged. The Crow take him to their village where he is given as a slave
to an old woman, Greasy Hand, mother of a leading warrior, Yellow Robe. He must
endure many hardships, not least of which is being treated as sub-human and as
a beast of burden. He gives himself the name of Horse, as being better than no
name.

He
gradually acclimatizes and after four months begins to pick up the language. He
manages to overcome one of two passing Indians, “a member of some enemy tribe”,
and wins two horses which he presents to Yellow Robe for the hand of his
sister, Pretty Calf, whom he calls Freedom. The wife and child perish in premature
childbirth, and “he went home three years later”. He remains, when back in “civilization”,
very reserved about his ordeals.

The
story is tersely told, without embellishment and in a matter-of-fact, practical
way. There is, however, occasionally some elegant writing (I like it, for example, when Horse in love
is described as being “enslaved by Freedom”).

Many
details of this short story and, more, the essential tone of it were changed
radically for the motion picture. By 1970 (the year of Little Big Man, the film and also of Soldier Blue) we were in full revisionist mode but if we were all going
to movie theaters to see more Indian-oriented movies than the old cowboy ones, we were still watching
commercial pictures which slightly reveled in the cruelty, and never mind too
much if it were accurate. You don’t go to the movies to see a Western for an
anthropology lecture.

A huge
change is that the Crow were replaced by the Sioux. I don’t know why. The hero,
now named as John Morgan, has become an English aristo with rather 1970s blond
hair. You’d think the Indians would have wanted that scalp on their lodge-poles
or bridles but nay. Morgan is played (and this is one of the major weaknesses
of the film) by Irishman Richard Harris, a notorious ham. The old hag Greasy Hand
is strongly, if stereotypically played by Australian Judith Anderson, and
Yellow Hand (no longer Yellow Robe – maybe the Yellow Hand moniker brought back
vague notions of Buffalo Bill) is played by Fijian Islander Manu Tupou (who
popped up briefly again as the pawnbroker in the excellent Payback). Pretty Calf has been renamed Running Deer and is played
by a Greek, Corinna Tsopei, attractive in a sweet way. Some of the actors in
the smaller parts were American Indian, however, and the movie was partially shot
on location in South Dakota. Some of the Robert B Hauser photography, especially early shots of Indians running, is very classy.

Irishman woos Greek

Mr. Harris
is, early in the picture, often seen pinkly naked and this heightens his vulnerability
and non-person status.

The
movie centers on the famous and deeply unpleasant scene of initiation which
involves Harris being hauled up in the air on rawhide thongs attached to knives
inserted in his pectorals. This rite is completely invented; it was not in the Johnson
story and was never practiced by either Crow or Sioux. It has a lurid and
salacious ring to it and has always put me off the film. The film is one of
those which irritatingly claims to be authentic and factual historically. It is
nothing of the kind. As I have so often said in this blog, I have no objection
to Western movies distorting historical truth – they are there to tell an
exciting story, not give you a history lesson – but when they mendaciously claim to tell the factual truth, then I do
object.

He looks more Fijian than Sioux

There
are other changes. The film invents another captive, Batise (third-billed Jean
Gascon) who conveniently speaks English and French – which of course was
perfectly possible – and that overcomes Harris’s language problems. In the
movie, unlike the story, he never really learns the lingo. (The decision to
have a lot of Sioux dialogue with no subtitles was a brave one but was the
right way to go; it highlights Horse’s isolation, and we can anyway usually
infer what is meant.) Horse kills two enemy Indians, Shoshone, in the film and
scalps one. Makes it a bit bloodier. One detail, however, is gorier in the book
than the on the screen: old Greasy Hand beheads an annoying dog in the story. Pierced
pecs are one thing, but showing a pooch killed on screen, such horrors would
never do, so that was quietly dropped.

The director was Elliot Silverstein, who had only done one other Western - and that was Cat Ballou.

By the
way, long before Richard Harris, a 1958 episode of Wagon Train also used the story (this time it was Yellow Rope for some reason, played by
Hollywood’s resident Indian chief, Aussie Michael Pate) and used the same
title, A Man Called Horse. It had as
Horse Ralph Meeker – Roy Anderson in The Naked Spur and Lt. Driscoll in The Run
of the Arrow, another lurid Indian-rites flick with an overacting star not suited to Westerns.

Thursday, November 28, 2013

The
Western, like jazz, was in origin a specifically American genre. The two could
almost be thought of as the defining American genres. But both had a huge
impact outside America. The Western, any more than jazz, does not belong exclusively to Americans.
Europeans, especially, have been and still are writers of Western stories and
makers of Western movies as well as readers of Western fiction and avid
moviegoers. Long before the spaghetti westerns of the 1960s, the French,
British and Germans, among others, were producing novels and motion pictures.

In France, in
1896 Gabriel Veyre shot Repas d’Indien (Indian banquet) for the Lumière
brothers and Joe Hamman starred as Arizona Bill in films made in the horse
country of the Camargue in 1911. The book Il était une fois... le western
européen : 1901-2008by Jean-François Giré (2008) gives a whole
history of the Western in France and Europe. The modern sport of fast draw
first became popular in France (and figured in the 1908 Olympics…) New Lucky Luke and Blueberrybandes dessinées are eagerly sought at the FNAC. French hip
hop and rap artist MC Solaar had a great track, Nouveau Western, on his 1994 album Prose Combat.

Arizona Bill, Lucky Luke, Blueberry, MC Solaar: French Western heroes

In Italy, Puccini’s
opera La Fanciulla del West (The Girl of the Golden West) was first
performed in 1910, was filmed twice as a silent movie (which must have been
odd) and twice as a talkie – or singie. Sergio Leone’s father directed the
silent La Vampira Indiana in 1913
(with Sergio’s mamma as the title Indian princess). Il western italiano, a bookby Alberto Pezzotta (2012) tells the story of the whole
Italian Western experience. Francesco de Gregori’s wonderful album Bufalo Bill(1976) is an Italian hymn to the West and one of my favorite CDs.

In Germany,
already in the 1890s Karl May was writing enormously popular Western stories
starring Old Shatterhand, made into silent movies in the 1920s (when 1920s Bela
Lugosi also starred in German films as Uncas), and Shatterhand and Surehand B-movies filmed in Yugoslavia, starring Lex Barker and Stewart Granger, were big
hits in the 1960s.

Yeehar, Karl

In the UK, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show was a monster hit in British (and many other European)
towns and much appreciated by Queen Victoria and the Prince of Wales. The first
color Western was British (Fate,
1911). Silent Westerns were enormously popular and Tom Mix was fêted as a hero
on his visit to London. British or semi-British Westerns like The Sheriff of Fractured JaworThe Savage Guns pre-dated spaghettis by
several years. The leading authority on Wild Bill Hickok, Joseph G Rosa, was
from Ruislip, Middlesex.

Tom Mix in England fêted by small boys of all ages

In 1971, Edwin
Sherin directed Burt Lancaster in the Elmore Leonard story Valdez Is Coming. How American can you get? It was filmed in Spain.
When Tombstone and Wyatt Earp were being made in the early
1990s, where did Wyatt Earp have to
get its costumes from? Europe.

Not that Howard Hughes, surely?

European directors of
Westerns like Fritz Lang, cinematographers like Roger Deakins, writers like Alan Sharp have all contributed enormously to the development of the genre.

Hope you caught Der Schatz im Silbersee back in '62

All over
Europe you can find Western film festivals, dude ranches, rodeos, line dancing, fast draw competitions
and every kind of Western event. European moviegoers await new Westerns as
eagerly as they do Stateside.

Wednesday, November 27, 2013

Crossfire Trail is really an excellent film. Tom Selleck’s
production company TWS teamed up with Simon Wincer (Ozzie director of Selleck
in Quigley Down Under and before that the great Lonesome Dove) and a couple of good Dove actors (Barry Corbin, William
Sanderson) to make a seriously classy TV Western.

Selleck
made his mark back in 1979 in a TV oater, The Sacketts, based on the Louis L’Amour novels, and then in another L’Amour
tale, The Shadow Riders, also for TV,
in 1982. Later, round about the turn of the century, he made a nice little
series of such movies, such as Last Stand at Saber River, Crossfire Trail andMonte Walsh. They were all good, some outstanding.

The novel

Saber River had been based on a high-quality Elmore Leonard novel but for Crossfire
Selleck went back to L’Amour, a 1954 book, L’Amour’s eighth. It tells of a
tough, decent Rafe (for Rafael) Covington, who makes a promise to a dying
friend that he will take care of his ranch in Wyoming – and his widow.

Selleck very good. He convinces.

It
was originally aired on TNT on January 21, 2001 and was enormously popular,
securing over 12 million viewers. Justifiably so, because it is very well done.

Why?
Well, one reason is Selleck himself. He really looked the part and his decent
tough-guy act was just right for a gritty Westerner with his mind set on doing
what a man’s gotta do.

Another
reason is the support acting, especially of Barry Corbin as the bought-and-paid-for
sheriff. He had aged somewhat from his bumbling Roscoe in Lonesome Dove and is
now gray-bearded, even plumper and absolutely superb. He introduces himself as
justice of the peace but warns that around here there ain’t much of either.

Barry Corbin excellent

We also have William Sanderson (Lippy in Lonesome Dove and EB Farnum in the HBO Deadwood) as the bartender. Again, he is top class and lifts the whole movie during his scenes.

William Sanderson also very good behind the bar

The
other actors are OK, though would not set the Milk River on fire. Virginia
Madsden is the beautiful blond widow. Mark Harmon is the saloon owner who owns
half the town and wants the other half, the widow and the widow’s ranch for the oil on it. He
had been Johnny Behan in Wyatt Earp. He
looks very like a young Randolph Scott. He is satisfactorily bad, slimily charming at first then just plain mean.

Bad guy Harmon. Not bad.

Wilford
Brimley is amusing in the tough James Gammon-y old-timer sidekick part. He’d been doing
Westerns since the late 60s (he was in True Grit) and is appropriately crusty, wry and stalwart.

Old-timer sidekick: Wilford Brimley

Selleck’s other
sidekicks are a bit on the bland side. Glaswegian David O’Hara battles with an ‘Irish’
accent. Also a bit weak, unfortunately, was the fearsome hired gun that bad guy
Harmon gets up from Kansas, Beau Dorn (played by Brad Johnson, in his fifth Western).
Director Wincer does a good job with making him as sinister as possible, face
in shadow as long as possible, that kind of thing, and the costume and props depts.
also did well with his fancy clothes and scary long-range rifle with telescope
sight. But once he was actually in action he seemed a bit, well, ordinary.

Hired gun Brad Johnson not really frightening enough

The
movie was shot in Alberta, as so many Westerns are these days, and it does
look wonderful. The photography is by David Eggby, who had worked for Wincer on
Quigley in Australia and Lightning Jack (a sort of Crocodile Dundee goes West) in New Mexico. There is a
slight Wincer/Eggby tendency to pretty-prettiness and picture postcard views, but
not enough to spoil things. Mostly, you just admire the scenery.

Pacey
direction with tension building to the inevitable showdown and a tight Charles
Robert Carner screenplay (Carner’s only Western) from the L’Amour novel mean
that this Western grips well and keeps you watching.

Yes, the movie is pretty formulaic but you
know, with Westerns that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Westerns follow certain
conventions, especially if they are written by famous novelists of the genre.
It’s a balance. You want the movie to respect the conventions. You enjoy
quotations of past epics. You want to feel comfortable in the West you know,
even if it is a mythical one. But you don’t want rip-offs and blatant copies
and hackneyed clichés. A good production can get that balance right. This
Selleck/Turner/Wincer collaboration did that.

Tuesday, November 26, 2013

Last Stand at Saber River was the fourth Western novel
written by Elmore Leonard (1925 – 2013) and was published in 1959. Nearly forty
years later, it was made into a TV movie starring Tom Selleck by Selleck’s
production company TWS and it aired on TNT in 1997.

The
novel is one of Leonard’s best. His previous one, Escape from Five Shadows in 1956, had been solid but unremarkable but
Last Stand has much more vim and zip.

A goodie

The
story starts and ends at a familiar Leonard setting, a low adobe in Arizona, a former
Hatch & Hodges swing station now serving as a general store. There, on
April 9, 1865, a family arrives in a wagon. Paul Cable, his loving wife Martha
and their three small children have returned after an absence in Texas when
Paul was fighting on the Confederate side during the War. Wounded, he is
invalided out and they decide to reclaim their Arizona farm.

They
find many changes, not the least of which is the fact that a newly installed family of
Union sympathizers, led by the brothers Duane and Vern Kidston, has taken over
their house and graze. In addition the former store keeper, their friend, has
died and been replaced by a sinister one-armed Confederate gun runner, Edward
Janroe.

The plot
is based on Cable’s fight over the coming week to regain and hold his property
and protect his family.

The Master

Like
most of Leonard’s novels, it’s very well done. It has an air of authenticity
and the pace of the story is lively: the plot rattles along like a Hatch & Hodges four-up. The
writing is spare, economical and unvarnished, which suits the gritty character
of the hero and the hard terrain of the setting.

Leonard’s
heroes are tough, hard-bitten Westerners but they are not invincible supermen.
Likewise, his villains have saving graces and are quite subtly drawn.

Although
Duane Kidston’s spoiled daughter sets her cap at Cable and tries to drive a
wedge between his wife and him, she fails, straight away, and this story is quite
unusual in having no traditional love interest, no girl to be wooed and won, but
rather features a happily married couple with loved and loving children.

The
Selleck movie changed a lot of this. His story starts back in Texas, before the
Arizona trip, with him coming back from the war when his wife (played by Suzy
Amis, who had starred in The Ballad of Little
Jo in 1993) and family thought he was dead. One of their children has died in his
absence and she has consequent psychological issues. Their renewed relationship is difficult
and teeters on the edge of collapse. I’m not sure what was gained by this change but
whatever the reason for it, the result is that they overdid it and the wife ends by
becoming unsympathetic and rather tiresome. OK, dear, so you had a bad time. But
so did your husband and so did a lot of people. Get over it. That was my
(probably heartless) reaction anyway.

Character of the wife not well done

Selleck
does a good job, though. He looked convincing in Western gear and carried it
off. He had first come to notice in The Sacketts in 1979, a TV adaptation of the Louis L’Amour novels, and had
reunited with Sam Elliott and Ben Johnson in the Andrew V McLaglen-directed The Shadow Riders, also for TV, in 1982.
But it was really as Quigley in the excellent Quigley Down Under in 1990, a part scheduled for Steve McQueen which
Selleck took because of McQueen’s illness, that he established himself as a
leading Western star of modern times. Saber
River was one of a series of good TV Westerns that he made around the turn
of the century and it was followed notably by Crossfire Trail and an outstanding remake of Monte Walsh.

Selleck: looked the part

Another
good thing about the TV Last Stand at
Saber River is that there is a brace of Carradines in it. David plays Duane
and Keith plays Vern. They do an excellent job, as they always did. Harry Carey
Jr. also has a bit part as Martha’s dad, a character not in the novel.

Keith Carradine as Vern Kidston with Spencer rifle

Shot by
Ric Waite (The Long Riders) in New
Mexico, some of it around delightful Las Vegas (where some of the earliest silent
Westerns were also filmed) the movie looks good. The music, by David Shire, is
appropriate and strong.

The
film was directed by Dick Lowry, who had done all those Kenny Rogers Gambler ones. The pace of it is
slower than that of the novel and needed a bit of tightening up, though he’s
good at the action scenes. The costumes and guns are period-correct and
convincing.

Last Stand at Saber River, the TV movie, was probably the least
of Selleck’s efforts and it isn’t the world’s greatest Western but it is a
solid, entertaining production. Last
Stand at Saber River, the novel, is a tight little gripper by a master of
Western paperback fiction.

If I say
it is probably the least remarkable of Leonard’s Westerns, by that I don’t mean that it
is poor. All Elmore Leonard Westerns are well-written and enjoyable. But it
doesn’t really have the panache of Randado
and is certainly not of the class of great novels like Hombre or Valdez is Coming,
partly because the characters are a bit paler.

The Five
Shadows of the title is a convict labor camp where our hero, Corey Bowen, has
been unjustly sent after a spell in Yuma Territorial Prison for a crime he did
not commit, rustling. The camp is run by crooked, cruel Frank Renda who is
taking the government funding for himself, mistreating the convicts and hiring
out their labor for his own gain to build a road. Renda has a sadistic gunman crony,
Brazil, and also a group of Mimbreño Apache trackers in case any convict should
run. But Corey is determined to escape…

There’s
a girl, natch. She’s Karla, daughter of the owner of the local Hatch &
Hodges stage station (we are in southern Arizona, of course, it being a Leonard
Western). Karla knows Convict Corey’s good just by looking at him and she is going to help
him prove his innocence, though her dad has his doubts.

Well, it’s
fairly predictable but like all Leonard Westerns it’s pacey and actionful. It
also has a ring of authenticity. Corey’s relationship with the Apaches is
especially well done.

Elmore Leonard (1925 - 2013)

I would
say, though, that it’s the most traditional of the stories and reads like a
Luke Short. That’s praise, not criticism – I love Luke Short Westerns – but it’s
a straight tale of brave Westerner beats crooked thugs and gets girl. No sex, no rude words, a fair bit of violence.

It never
made it to the screen but if it had it might have been a Randolph Scott movie with
Karen Steele as Karla, Richard Boone as Renda, that kind of thing. It would
have been an OK B-Western, with some nice AZ location photography shot round
there at Sedona.

Sunday, November 24, 2013

Just
about passable as Eurowesterns go, this fairly early example (original title Tierra brutal) was directed by Londoner Michael
Carreras, grandson of the founder of the Hammer studios and himself top dog
there at the time. He was taking a break from lurid horror films to go off to
Spain to make a Western.

He got
some American stars who were not exactly in the first rank (I'm being polite here) to appear in it. Richard
Basehart had done a couple of B-Westerns and some TV shows (he was born in
Zanesville, Ohio, birthplace of Zane Grey, so we honor him; Dennis Hopper was born in Dodge, and Stuart Gilmore, director of the Joel McCrea remake of The Virginian, was born in Tombstone - forget about being born with a silver spoon in your mouth, that's like being born with a silver Colt in your holster). Baseheart plays Steve Fallon, an
embittered gunfighter in black leather who wants to hang up his irons and
settle down in Sonora.

I prefer the Spanish poster

Don
Taylor is Summers, an American rancher in Mexico who has been so scarred by his
experience in the Civil War that he won’t touch a gun again. Taylor had acted
in one B-Western (the Luke Short story Ambush,
1950) but moved into directing TV shows. His face is kinda familiar. He looks a
bit like David Janssen, I think that’s what it is. He has a beautiful Mexican
wife (Manolita Barroso) and, natch, a glam daughter (Paquita Rico) for the
gunfighter to fall for.

There are seven bad-guy riders, you notice

There is
the obligatory evil, grasping rancher who wants the whole valley. Well, there
had to be. He is Ortega (José Nieto, quite good in a dastardly way) and the
noble Don he has dispossessed? They wheeled Fernando Rey out for that part. Sadly,
the film is quite crudely dubbed so a lot of the acting is marred. Ortega has a
lightning-fast American gunman as a henchman, Danny, and this part is played by
Alex Nicol, the no-good Dave Waggoman in The Man from Laramie. The question is, of course, who is faster, Danny or the
famed Fallon? Such suspense.

Alex Nicol, gunslinger

Far
better than the later spaghettis that were to be made in Spain, this one is
more on a par with A Man called Noon or Catlow. No great shakes but you’ve seen worse.

Saturday, November 23, 2013

Randolph
Scott was in five films in 1939. There was a coast guard movie, one about
pilots, and three Westerns. The first oater was his part in the brash, fun Jesse James with Tyrone Power and Henry
Fonda, and the third was Frontier Marshal,
when he was the first to play Wyatt Earp on screen.

Sadly,
however, the middle one was little more than a Shirley Temple vehicle and, to
make matters worse, was set in Canada.

I don’t
think that stories of how the Mounties got their men were really Westerns, not
proper ones, and Randy looks ridiculous in his ‘British’ mustache and red uniform
with silly bell hop's cap. And I didn’t know Her Majesty’s officers rode mustangs with
Texas saddles or spoke with Virginia accents. A couple of his brother officers
were actually English anyway, so at least central casting got that right.

Not Randy's finest hour

Now I don’t
want you to think me a curmudgeon (though you probably will) but I don’t really like children in Westerns.
I know there were families with offspring on the frontier and so I guess they have to be shown
but so often in Westerns they were Hollywood brats. I didn’t even like the whiny child in Shane. Most people think he was adorable but I think he wasn't a patch on the tough kid in the book. About the best boy was Lee Aaker,
the Rin Tin Tin lad, who was first
class in Hondo. Some of them could
act remarkably well – think of that little girl in Shoot Out with Gregory Peck – but paraphrasing Dr. Johnson, "Sir,
a child's acting is like a dog's walking on his hind legs. It is not done well;
but you are surprised to find it done at all."

In Susannah, Shirley is indeed in the ‘acting
remarkably well category’; she was very talented. Because Westerns weren’t
really in those days a girl thing, they also had a little boy in it for Shirley
to pal up with, the son of the chief, called Little Chief (played by Martin
Good Rider, a Blackfoot), so this is really a children’s movie. And for their
mothers. I hope their poor dads didn’t have to go. Maybe they sneaked out at
the interval and went for a beer.

Shirley with her little Blackfoot pal

The
Indians (it’s an Indians-against-the railroad plot) are even more “Ug, me big
chief” than was usual for this time and the script is very weak despite (or
because of) the fact that no fewer than nine writers contributed to the
screenplay from a Muriel Denison novel. There were even two directors. The
Indians also wear their feathered war bonnets and paint all the time, rather
like you and me wearing our tuxedos or long dresses to wash the car.

Orphan
Shirley speaks to “Mr. Big Eagle” and saves the day.

Shirley saves the day

Margaret
Lockwood appears for Randy to fall for. She's the colonel's daughter, natch, though colonels are called superintendents in the RCMP. Good old J Farrell MacDonald is there as Inspector
Randy’s Irish servant who cares for the little girl. Victor Jory is the bad
Indian Wolf Pelt (there always has to be a bad Indian who wants war). When he joins the real Blackfoot extras in a war dance he is embarrassingly bad. Still, I am a Jory fan so I forgive.

This
film is not actually unwatchable (the only truly unwatchable Randolph Scott
Western is Belle of the Yukon). But
it isn’t very good either. Strictly for Shirley Temple fans only.